Monstervision's Joe Bob Briggs Looks At

The Evil Dead (1983)

(From Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide)

There's only one way to kill the zombies: total dismemberment. Hands,
arms, legs, and yes, of course, HEADS will roll, in this classic by
Michigan State film student Sam Raimi. It's your basic Spam-in-a-cabin
splatter plot--kids go into the woods, kids don't come out--but it's got
a style all its own. How about the woman raped by the woods? (Not IN the
woods. BY the woods.) Or the scene where a zombie with superhuman strength
stabs a guy in the ankle with a No. 2 wooden pencil and rams that baby all
the way through? Or the chainsaw scene where a girl has to be sawed up
into itty-bitty pieces by her friends because she turned zombie on em?
When they find the "evil book" upstairs, bound in human flesh, they learn
that zombieism is contagious, and that unseen zombie presences have left
them a taped message: "You will die. One by one we will take you." The
movie then raises a lot of moral questions, like, if your girlfriend turns
zombie on you, what are you supposed to do? (Answer: get a meat cleaver
and start making like the butcher at Safeway.) But they make one big
mistake. When a girl starts spewing white slime and going around breaking
people's arms with her bare hands and growing Dracula teeth, instead of
offing her, they monkey around and try to stuff her in the basement for a
while till they figure out what to do. This was the first film of Raimi's
childhood friend Bruce Campbell, as Ash, the guy who takes gallons of face
blood and keeps on flailing. When Ash's girlfriend finally gets stabbed in
the back, turning her back into just a normal dead person instead of a
zombie woman, Ash KNOWS what he has to do. He takes her into the chainsaw
room and starts to make her into chicken fried steak, but then breaks down
and decides to just BURY her instead. And we won't even MENTION the scene
where the girl has to cut off her own hand, much less the one where the
zombies start decaying and aging 2,000 years in two minutes.
Nineteen
gallons blood.One breast. Four beasts, not including the rapist forest.
With Ellen Sandweiss as the forest rapee, Sarah York as the girlfriend.
Four stars.

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1983)

One of the few sequels that's actually better than the original, a Spam-in-a-cabin zombie classic that scores a 99 on the Vomit Meter and sets the world record for blood-and-slime spewing. Bruce Campbell is back
as Ash, the guy who couldn't decide whether to carve up his
girlfriend in the first movie, but this time he doesn't hesitate.
She's chainsaw meat at the 20-minute mark, and pretty soon Ash is
getting rammed through windshields, pitched through doors, and
watching his girlfriend come back out of her grave to do a little
dance for him. She doesn't just dance topless, she dances
HEADLESS. And by the time her head gloms onto his hand and he has
to put the head in a vise to squash the life out of it, we know
that this time nobody is gonna forget that there's only ONE way
to kill the zombies: total dismemberment. Arms, legs, and yes,
heads must roll.
Two zombie breasts. Six dead bodies. Blood-
spewing. Zombie detached-hand attack. Hand spearing. Hand sawing.
Flying-eyeball swallowing. Fruit-cellar demon attacks. Zombie
axing. Heads roll. Hands roll. Everything rolls. Glopola City.
Double-barrel sawed-off shotgun blast through the eyes of a demon
Fu. With Dan Hicks as the redneck guide searching for his dead
girlfriend, Kassie Wesley as the girl who gets raped, pillaged
and murdered by the woods (not IN the woods, BY the woods).
Campbell has the classic line: "Am I fine? We just cut up our
girlfriends with a chainsaw. Does that sound fine?"
Directed once again by Sam Raimi.

Army of Darkness (Evil Dead 3)

The 3rd Evil Dead movie is currently showing on AMC (American Movie Classics). Here's their description:
This third installment of writer/director Sam Raimi's comic-bookish horror trilogy that began with The Evil Dead (1982) finds one-armed Ash (Bruce Campbell) stuck in the 14th century, armed only with his trusty chainsaw prosthetic. After wiping out a few score Deadites, Ash plaintively asks to go home and is told that to do so, he needs to locate the Necronomicon, a book that can raise or put down the dead. Along the way, Ash romances the princess Sheila (Embeth Davidtz) and has to deal with the Evil Ash, a malevolent version of himself. When he finally arrives at the graveyard where the magic book is reputedly located, he mangles the required incantation and, instead of snaring the book, awakens the army of darkness: a multitude of walking skeletons. A wild Raimi ride, with a hilarious performance from the under-used Campbell, non-stop action, and terrific special effects by William Mesa.